Steven Malanga on how cities can get by

December 16, 2011

How can cities across the United States get by during these difficult economic times? To discuss, Steve Malanga joins host Maria Hinojosa. He is a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute. Mr. Malanga is also the senior editor of City Journal, the Institute’s quarterly publication examining urban policy issues.

Comments

“What
can they do about it?” They can walk away or they can refuse to
apply in the first place. Your loss not ours. No matter how you try to dance around it life is not a game of PR frame-manship.

Real
life ground level effect of the “we’ll reduce your pay so that we don’t have to
lay people off” policy, aka Catch 22….

You, as a current or future employee,
have to decide whether you can absorb the income loss with this job or whether
you can continue to work a job which may or may not require you work the same
amount of hours but requires you to take a second job in order to make ends
meet or whether the local/state governments are not offering a living wage and
you need to start looking for a job elsewhere.
Eventually you’ll find that no
one wants to work for the state and local governments because to put it
bluntly, if you insist on creation of a “survivor of the fittest world” and punish people by cutting their salaries then you have to accept
the fact that people are going to start using the amount of money for services
they render as a measuring stick and your local, state, and federal government may not be fit enough to survive and that you are going to get back the little or nothing you pay for and no more.

jan

Interesting effect that copy and paste generates…

Shreevester

I was very upset with the manipulation of the facts by by Steve. They were discussing the budget process relating to police and fire,and he threw out a 80% figure, leading us to believe that salaries of police and fire were 80 percent of the budget. Very misleading. Police and fire in Berkeley are 14 and 7 percent respectively. Pie graph at http://www.ci.Berkeley.ca.ushttp://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ContentDisplay.aspx?id=4402
Decataur Illinois claims the percentaand 27 percent.
Spring lake park, Minnesota? Claims a total of 42 percent.
No city claims 80 percent. Clearly the gentleman exaggerated. I ask why? Exaggeration is hurting America. We need our police and fireman.

Shreevester

I was very upset with the manipulation of the facts by by Steve. They were discussing the budget process relating to police and fire,and he threw out a 80% figure, leading us to believe that salaries of police and fire were 80 percent of the budget. Very misleading. Police and fire in Berkeley are 14 and 7 percent respectively. Pie graph at http://www.ci.Berkeley.ca.ushttp://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ContentDisplay.aspx?id=4402
Decataur Illinois claims the percentaand 27 percent.
Spring lake park, Minnesota? Claims a total of 42 percent.
No city claims 80 percent. Clearly the gentleman exaggerated. I ask why? Exaggeration is hurting America. We need our police and fireman.

jan

If you strip what he’s saying down to the bare bones, he’s saying that if they cut your salary and your benefits the organization will survive and flourish. What he isn’t saying is that you, on the other hand, will either have less to spend or you will have to get as many jobs as it takes to survive. And what he isn’t going anywhere near is the fact that the economy thrives when people have money to spend and falters or fails (like it is now) when people are stressed and struggling just to survive. Ms. Hinojosa doesn’t try to confront him with it either. And by the way, calling the Manhattan Institute “conservative leaning” is not unlike saying Attila the Hun was mildly aggressive.

If you look at their website, you find out that they think people in manufacturing jobs average $73,000 a year. (Insertion of some reality: Around here they are more likely to make somewhere between $9.00 – $15.00 an hour or $18,720 to $31,200 gross a year.) They have an article about government vs. unions, an article claiming that wind energy is expensive, an article that favors fracking. They have an event scheduled about Supply Side Economics – from the Reagan era to today. They have an article the states corporations should not be treated as criminals.

They have several paragraphs where they define a consumer taking charge of their own healthcare as the insurance company only being required to pay for catastrophic charges (catastrophic as defined by whom?) and the consumer paying for everything else. I’m guessing they’re wanting to change the part where you currently pay 20% of the visit to 100% of the visit. Example: If I have to pay the full cost of the recent in office procedure, it would never have been done due to an inability to come up with the full amount. I also noticed something on the site pushing health saving accounts. Healthcare savings accounts are a mirage, a delusion.

Mr. Malanga looks and sounds reasonable until you go to the Manhattan Institute and listen to what he says and writes. “The Continuing Shakedown of the American Taxpayer” attempts to lay the blame for the failing free market at the feet of unions rather than corporations who leave the country for dirt cheap labor elsewhere. His article “Whites Hit Hardest by Public Employee Layoffs” tries to make the case that blacks aren’t being harmed by layoffs because they are private sector employees. Some might interpret it as a tactical maneuver, an effort to minimize black reaction to the proposed layoffs.

I look forward to the day they finally feature a “liberal leaning” speaker like Reich, Greenwald, or Wendell Potter on the Need to Know but I’m not holding my breath. Till then I’m more or less marking time while waiting for Mr. Moyers’ return even if it isn’t PBS.

njmolecule

He claimed compensation costs made up 80% of a typical municipal budget, not police and fire salaries specifically. ”Exaggeration is hurting America” Indeed.

Need to Know is a production of Creative News Group (CNG) in association with WNET. Marc Rosenwasser is Executive Producer. Need to Know is made possible by Bernard and Irene Schwartz, Mutual of America, Citi Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Foundation, Margaret A. Cargill Foundation, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS.